can you feel the weight of it (the whole world at your fingertips)
by DaughterOfPoseidon333
Summary: Rey couldn't remember anything before the deserts of Jakku or "The belonging you seek is no behind you. It is ahead". Rey one-shot. Not any major spoilers, but still better to read if you've seen The Force Awakens.


**A Rey one-shot because I love Rey so, so, so much! Seriously, she's the best. This is a one-shot/character study thingy. I'm not really sure. I just had some Rey feelings so.**

 **Not really any major spoilers for the movie but I still wouldn't read if you haven't seen it.**

 **Title taken from a Sleeping at Last song: "I'll Keep You Safe"**

 **I don't own anything! Enjoy!**

 **-:-**

Rey couldn't remember anything before the deserts of Jakku.

Every time she tried to remember where she'd come from before Jakku, she drew up a blank, no matter how hard she tried to remember. And her family, the ones she begged and screamed for not to go, every time she tried to remember their faces, it was like she was trying to see them through the blur of a sandstorm. There was only the vague outline of them and nothing more before their ship took off and left her alone with nothing but a first name for all those years.

 _Rey. She was Rey._ She was also smart and resourceful, and quickly figured out how to survive on her own, how to scavenge, and how to tell all the nooks and crannies of any ship apart. She was Rey, but she was also very, very alone. Her only companion the hope that one day…someday…her family would return and she could finally stop scrawling lines into the metal interior of the fallen metal beast that was her shelter. She refused to call it a home. Home was where her family was and she would wait for them until they returned.

But the days and weeks and months blurred into years. She could remember nothing before the endless stretches of sand she had grown so familiar with. The only seas she had were the ones made of dunes, the only foliage the wrecks of imperial and rebel ships alike from the battle that had taken place so many decades ago. She often wondered what the galaxy was like outside of Jakku, always wondered what it would be like to just take one of the ships she knew she could captain and fly far, far away. But she never took that step, never thought too long and hard about leaving because she promised herself a long time ago she would wait for her family to return. They promised they would and she believed them. (Maybe not so much anymore, but truth be told, she was too afraid to believe anything else).

So she watched instead, watched ships leave the planet, off to distant planets that had so much more to them then the day after day life she lived in the desert, watching the sun set and turn the sands brilliant hues of orange and red and pink, before dipping the world in purple, then blue, then black. The stars would come out and she would fall asleep dreaming about what it would be like among them, stomach usually only half-full, before waking and repeating it all over again.

She imagined she'd be doing that the rest of her life, always alone, never knowing what name came after Rey, never knowing what parents had given it to her, never knowing where she truly came from before the desert…until everything she had known for fifteen years turned upside down. Suddenly she had something else worth fighting for.

For so, so long (as long as she could remember) it had been about living one day after the other, fending for herself until her family came back, never knowing she could belong anywhere else besides Jakku.

( _The belonging you seek is not behind you. It is ahead.)_

But now she knew, she _knew_ that it didn't matter how many lines she scratched into the metal, didn't matter that she'd spent so many nights wishing, begging that her family return before crying herself to sleep, her lone cries echoing through the metal husk of the fallen walker…none of that matter because _she belonged._ She belonged with the Resistance. With her _friends_ , something she never dreamed she'd have.

She was Rey. She was _Rey._ She didn't need to be anything other than that because that single name was enough. Even if she never found her family, she had found her place in the galaxy. She had found _herself._ Maybe it was the Force, maybe it was the feeling of finally knowing why she felt so different, so alone, but she was pretty sure it was because she _had_ found a family of sorts. Finn and BB-8 and the other members of the Resistance. She was among the people she had heard so many stories about, the people she, for so long, had dreamed of becoming a part of.

In just a matter of days she had seen new planets, had traveled thousands of more lightyears than she ever imagined, had felt pain beyond anything like she had felt before, but for the first time since being left on Jakku, she felt like she could _breathe._ She was living, _truly living,_ for the first time and it was exhilarating. Better than sledding down sand dunes, better than finding new ships to excavate and scavenge, better than any dream she could conjure up. She had been missing something for so long, leaving her empty and hollow. She'd lived with that for so long that it became normal, something she could so easily push to the back of her mind and ignore, but now that she was discovering everything she had been missing out on, she never wanted to feel empty again.

She felt so full of life, so full of hope and opportunity, she could feel the Force around her and now understood what that meant, what it was, and she found that she didn't mind that she didn't know what her last name was. That was an empty space she had worried and wondered about forever, but now, she was so full of everything else that just being Rey was pretty wonderful.

 **-:-**

 **Thanks for reading!**

 **-DaughterOfPoseidon333**


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